Art on the Net not Net-Art
After a long absensence (since the late eighties) it is once again a
normal experience to go into galleries and museums and find works in
which exciting artists use video. Significantly what neither the
artists, nor the critics have reverted to is the term "video art".
Artists such as Georgina Starr or Matthew Barney may be geographically
apart but share a certain sensibility, they are also shrewd enough to
avoid of the trap of being confined within the metaphor of given medium.
Much of this new work is in fact revisiting the strategies of a much
earlier generation Aconci, Abromovich/Uly etc, whose approach to video
was also quick and dirty. Unlike those who came next there was no
mystification of the medium, no "video art" as such. It was a tool, not
an ideology. The same is true for the recent generation who grew up with
the camcorder as just another household appliance, part of a continuum
of media possibilities and almost as easy as picking up a pencil. It
feels very natural, and the art is better for it.
This new generation may not have been around, but they are probably
prevented from taking the wrong direction by some residual folk memory
of the theoretical somersaults and tedious technological formalism that
accompanied debates about what might or might not be *real* "video art".
Is there a lesson for us to learn from this history? Yes, I believe that
those of us who love the net and love art, and want to work in both
should learn from the past and avoid the simplistic device of marrying
these two terms. The term net-art (as opposed to art that happens to
appear on the net) should be quietly ditched.
David Garcia
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